What Should a Call Center Audit Checklist Look Like?
by Arina Smith Customer Service 25 February 2021
Measuring the effectiveness of your business’s facilities is essential to determining which are performing as expected and which aren’t meeting your expectations. While it’s easy to look at a spreadsheet with most departments’ results, gauging call center effectiveness can be a tricky task. Because call centers are in direct communication with your clients and customers, a wide array of variables can affect their overall efficiency and return on investment.
Call Center Performance Metrics:
The easiest, most straightforward way to assess a business’s performance is to collect and check its metrics over a long period of time. And that includes call centers.
Most call center systems automatically track multiple metrics that allow you to estimate the amount of business and revenue it’s bringing in. Some metrics to look out for:
Calls per Agent:
The number of calls should be comfortably divided by the number of agents you have. Too many calls per agent is a sign you should be hiring more agents, while too few calls per agent mean you need to cut jobs or increase daily quotas.
Call Length:
Calls shouldn’t be too short, where the caller was rushed through assistance, nor too long, where they burden the client calling and interrupt their schedule.
Cost per Call:
The average cost of each call compared to the average revenue each call generates results in your call center’s ROI or return on investment.
Average Answer Speed:
The shorter the wait time, the better. If this specific metric is too high, you need to employ additional call agents to ensure customer satisfaction.
Abandonment Rates:
High abandonment rates could be the result of long wait times, poor customer service, or abnormally-long call durations.
Service Quality:
Ask callers to rate how satisfied they were with the call with no more than one or two questions to estimate their satisfaction with the service they received.
It’s also important to note that just because you weren’t tracking metrics and data, it doesn’t mean it’s too late to start. Metrics from a couple of weeks alone can reveal so much about your call center’s weak and strong points.
Phone Number Validation:
Even if all the metrics mentioned above were in the green, if your call center runs on a list of fake numbers, there will be a significant waste of time and resources on your end. An audit of your call lists is essential in ensuring your team has accurate phone data for outbound contacts and cold calls.
Luckily, fake numbers don’t have to be a necessary evil to contacting new clients. Nowadays, you can quickly and efficiently validate phone numbers. Phone validator bulk audit services test all the numbers in your phone list to make sure they are authentic working phone numbers. This type of service can save you countless hours of computational work and productivity lost on calls that will never be answered.
Agent Accountability:
In some cases, inexperienced or careless agents are the reason behind your poor call center metrics. It’s important to hold your call agents accountable for how well they do their work. Some variables to considers are:
- Commitment to schedule,
- Adherence to company guidelines,
- Meeting call quotas,
- Meeting quality call scores,
- Having sufficient knowledge of your business, and
- Having pleasant manners.
Scripts and Training:
The average person in the modern world is regularly bombarded with information and ads from every direction, phones included. In order to stand out among the crowd, you need more than a generic script.
Set up regular sessions to train your call agents on being flexible and natural with their talking, all without going off-topic or losing their lead’s interest. Such sessions need to be regular, not just for new recruits, but to also audit your previous scripts and strategies for effectiveness and make changes if needed.
Operations and Systems:
A call center can’t run properly without organized operations and functioning systems. That’s why you need to audit both regularly, looking for flaws or low points to fix and enhance your call center’s performance.
Some aspects to consider include company structure, supervisor-to-team-members ratio, calls vs. emails performance, and calling software. But it’s also easy to forget about the hardware like actual phones, headphones, and microphones. They all need to be in good condition to ensure a pleasant phone call for your clients and agents.
Taking It One Step at a Time:
Call center audits are essential but can feel overwhelming. It’s understandable to be hesitant about doing one. But since they’re necessary, you should start one part at a time with the most basic, such as analyzing metrics using specialized software or validating your phone list. Gradually, auditing will become an indispensable part of how you run your call center.
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